


streetlights talk

by prettydizzeed



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Betrayal, Gambling, M/M, theyre both stubborn af
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-08 05:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11639862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: It's a fucking mutiny, is what this is, all the way down to the gun with a single bullet—and seriously, that's just because Han’s a dramatic bastard, because there is absolutely no way one bullet will help him in any foreseeable situation.Although he definitely didn't foresee this situation, so who knows.





	streetlights talk

**Author's Note:**

> title and italicized lyrics are from "South" by Hippo Campus
> 
> if you want to check out the playlist I was listening to while writing this, it's [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/pearl-is-me/playlist/3mTS7eQbuxkvVEsiERFfM1?si=j9LBJZKU)

_You broke down and left me with a_  
_chest hum, a black gun, and forty dollars_

  
It's a fucking mutiny, is what this is, all the way down to the gun with a single bullet—and seriously, that's just because Han’s a dramatic bastard, because there is absolutely no way one bullet will help him in any foreseeable situation.

Although he definitely didn't foresee this situation, so who knows.

“Fuck you!” Lando yells down the street, even though it’s empty and they're in the van and are far out of earshot by now. It doesn't even make him feel better, which shows how serious things have gotten.

He wonders how big the bribe was. Obviously sizeable—they were his crew first, though he never mistook familiarity for loyalty. How did the bastard even get enough money to convince four people who'd known Lando for years that it was a good idea to kick him out in an alley and drive off? Maybe he banked on having Lando's share of yesterday's profits. He’s reckless like that.

Which is exactly why Lando had said the bank job was a bad idea. The plan is unbelievably risky, and now Han is almost certain to land his ass in jail. Good fucking riddance.

Lando, on the other hand, will be fine. He has contacts all over this city, and his righteous indignation is being directly converted into adrenaline as he makes his way to the first one. Kris’s bar has been repainted since the last time he was here, and it has a new sign, but it still radiates seediness. He walks in.

The woman behind the bar raises her eyebrows but otherwise acts as if he is a regular, not someone who hasn't set foot in there for years. “The usual?” she asks.

“Nah,” he says, smiling at her, “I'm gonna need all the money I've got. Is Kris here?”

Brynn shakes her head, the spikes in her hair bouncing slightly. “She's waiting for a delivery at the house. She should be back pretty soon. How long are you in town?”

He flashes her a grin. “Indefinitely.”

She snorts. “Last time you said that, you were on our couch for a month.”

“I just need a week, tops.”

Brynn rolls her eyes. “I have no idea why Kris likes you so much, I hope you know that.”

He smirks. “She never tell you about Coruscant?”

All he gets is another eye roll. “I'm her wife, Lando. I know she doesn't swing your way. And even if she did…” Brynn wrinkles her nose. “You were never a threat.”

Instead of acknowledging that, he focuses on the first statement. “Congratulations.”

She nods. “You miss a lot in six years. Doesn't look like I missed very much, though. This is exactly the shape you were in last time.”

“About a hundred dollars less than last time, actually.”

She whistles. “Better get started, then.”

He goes over to the card tables and ignores the bad taste in his mouth as he picks up a hand of sabacc cards. He'll bounce back from this, by any means necessary.

*

He makes a few hundred dollars that first night, and enough in the first week to move from Kris and Brynn’s couch to renting their guest room.

“That's a new record,” Kris comments. “You must be really pissed this time.”

“Just a really sore back,” he says, smiling, because they don't need to know how furious he really is. It's constant, a humming under his skin and behind his eyes, and he works harder.

It takes a year to work his way from running shit for petty criminals to doing what he's really good at. Some hackers hire him for a few weeks, and that's how the smuggling ring finds him, has him scrambling their location for a couple months before they decide he's more useful elsewhere. He lets them think it was their idea.

When he finds out who their biggest client really is, he buys a good security system for his apartment and then blows the operation to ash.

He takes his time. Kris has a friend at the local paper, so he interns there, which is fucking demeaning for someone of his age and abilities, but he holds the anger as a second pulse and keeps going. A few months in, he says he has a big tip, but he wants to be the one to write the article. Says he'll publish it online if they don't want it. They do.

He's cleared every trace of himself from the files that are “anonymously leaked.” He doesn't try as hard with the others’ identities, but still, they won't be going to jail. He doesn't need anyone else with a vendetta.

It's on the front page. CLOUD CITY MAYOR LINKED TO DRUG TRAFFICKING OPERATION. Every news channel within range starts playing clips of the mayor’s anti-drug speeches. He resigns.

Lando wins.

It's almost too easy, honestly. REPORTER WHO EXPOSED LOCAL GOVERNMENTAL CORRUPTION ENTERS MAYORAL RACE. He's not even the one to write that headline.

It's a nice job. He buys a house. He displays the gun in a glass case.

*

He almost gets over it, which was not part of the plan.

After about two years in office, he puts the gun in a drawer and fills the case with pottery. He stops thinking about Han’s hands, dropping it on the pavement beside him, gripping the steering wheel as he drove away.

Instead, he thinks about Han’s mouth.

They’d only slept together a few times, just enough for it to be dangerous but not enough for the pattern to become a habit. At the time, he hadn't considered them the kind of nights one would dwell on almost three years later, but he’d also never considered that Han would be the one double-crossing him and not the other way around.

Well, he’d thought Han might try, he just hadn't thought he would get away with it.

So, tired of analyzing every possible way he could've seen this coming, he remembers their desperate kissing in the back of the van, shitty motel rooms when it was just the two of them and the mattresses felt so soft after weeks of taking turns sleeping in a moving car, mornings so tangled together that they'd felt inseparable.

No matter how good things are now, sometimes he still whispers “Fuck you” to the ceiling.

  
***

  
_Came back round, and drowned out, and left me with a  
chest hum, a black gun, and forty dollars_

  
It's inevitable: one of them is going to end up on the side of the road.

It’s basic logic; they're both too shamelessly selfish to keep themselves from considering how much money they could make without the other. This had worked for as long as they were better—more profitable, he means—together than alone, but they'd very obviously passed the end of that time frame a few jobs ago, so now he can wait for Lando to do something about it or he can do it himself.

Forty bucks isn't exactly generous, but if he keeps any less than what's left, he might not be able to convince himself it's worth it.

In the middle of the night, alone in a king-size bed he booked out of habit, Han doubts himself for a minute anyway.

*

He gets over it.

It's easy to, with the crew calling him “boss,” with the steering wheel worn to the shape of his fingers, with so much money coming in.

Even when the money stops coming as regularly, he doesn't think about Lando. Not in the daylight. Not as anything but a memory.

Then the crew is gone, one at a time, and then the money is gone all at once, and he counts the contents of his wallet and swears from the sheer irony of it. At least his pistol still has plenty of bullets.

It's hard to think of anything but Lando, then, with that kind of sign.

(He doesn't believe in fate, or God, or a universe with any sort of intentions. He didn't believe in luck even when he had it. But it's hard to look at the crumpled bills and think that this ever could've ended another way.)

He's not even sure if Lando's still in Bespin. He could look it up, but he feels in a weird way like he doesn't deserve to, like he should walk into this as unprepared as Lando did.

He rolls into Cloud City with barely enough gas to get him another mile.

The alley looks eerily unchanged, which doesn't do much to disrupt the thought that he was supposed to end up here, like it's been waiting. There wasn't really a reason to walk here—it's the opposite direction from all of the bars he was planning to scope out—but maybe he really is the sentimental bastard Lando accused him of being, laughter in his voice, tracing the edges of the map with its highlighted spiderweb of roads they'd traveled together.

When he steps into the first bar, the woman behind the counter sets a shot glass down with such force that he gets the sense that the alternative was to lob it at his head.

He swallows. She glares at him.

“There's a lot I'd like to say to you, but I swore I wouldn't steal his lines.”

He gapes at her. “What?”

She rolls her eyes. “I'm going to give you an address, not because I think he deserves this shit, but because you deserve what's coming to you.” She rattles off a street number and he scrambles to write it on his arm. “Now get the fuck out of my bar before I change my mind about being the first one to kick your ass.”

Han walks out, slightly dazed. He tries to think if Lando had any photographs of him.

The house is Lando's. He knew that as soon as the bartender had looked at him like she wanted to punch his nose in, but now, it's even more undeniable. It's sprawling, high-end, emanating more _class_ than anything Han’s ever called his own. Because Lando was never his, and yeah, the place is screaming with Lando's touch, his poise, his unrelenting confidence that was always tinged with something more elegant than Han’s swagger.

He can't knock. He just stands there, at the end of the driveway, listing every way in which he's fucked up in the past three and a half years, and then in the years of partnership before then, and then in all his life.

If he had a dollar for every mistake, he wouldn't be here.

*

Lando almost runs him over, but Han doesn't think it's on purpose, thinks it has more to do with the fact that he's standing in the middle of Lando's driveway in the dark than the fact that it's _him_ standing there. Still, he stays a few yards away from any tires when he moves to the side of the car. Lando is rolling the window down.

Han swallows, and Lando just looks at him.

“You've got a lot of guts coming here after what you pulled.”

Han presses his lips together. Nodding feels too much like an apology, but he's not about to deny it, either.

Lando rolls his eyes and laughs, and for an instant Han wants to regret coming here. “How are you doing, you old pirate?”

He knows it's a reference to the gun, but he doesn't flinch, doesn't do anything but grin. Lando opens his door, stands, and shakes his head, then hugs him. Han doesn't have enough energy to fight both the astonishment and the three years’ worth of want.

“I've got forty bucks to my name,” he says, and it sounds almost like _I'm sorry_ , or something close enough.

Lando laughs. “Karma kicked your ass.”

Han shrugs but can't help the wry smile; he's right. “Your friend at the bar about did, too.”

Lando laughs again, and Han wonders how much crying he's trying to make up for.

Han stays in the driveway and watches as he walks up to the house and unlocks the door, then as he turns and raises an eyebrow. “Well? There aren't any hotels here for anywhere near forty dollars a night. You coming in or you planning to sleep on the street?”

It's loaded and they both know it, like the gun at Han’s hip, or maybe more like the gun he suddenly knows Lando still has because Lando's a sentimental bastard, too. One last shot.

“Yeah,” he says, unable to think of a wisecrack that won't unbalance everything, “I'm coming.”

  
***

 

_Chest hum, a black gun, and forty dollars  
Chest hum, a black gun, and forty dollars_

 

Han doesn't bother to move enough for Lando to reach the lock, so Lando has to lock the door around him, and he almost laughs at how fitting it is, at how fucking stubborn they both are, incapable even of kissing like normal people. He doesn't kiss Han, though, just pockets the key and waits in Han’s space until Han rolls his eyes and acquiesces, kissing him without even the remotest taste of an apology for leaving, for showing up, for existing with a selfish soul. The honesty of his unrepentance is infuriating, is bizarrely refreshing. During no part of this will Han say _let me make it up to you_ , maybe because he understands he can't but more likely because recompense isn't the kind of thing that occurs to him. It's nice, Lando thinks, to know someone this well.

For instance, he knows Han will still be there when he wakes up, and he knows it will largely be because he has nowhere else to go. He knows that's the only reason Han is here now.

He also knows, though, as Han shrugs his jacket off, that none of this means Han doesn't want to be here. That, even though he will never say it, he would've come here a long time ago if he'd ever thought he had the choice.

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on tumblr @basilhallward


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